Yeah, I'm trying to tread carefully on the OT part of this; our momentary frolics are one thing, but all this meaty stuff that tends to swell as it goes along ... well, we ought to find a more suitable venue to take up that discussion.

I'll say this, though:

So yes, kinship wasn't something described in language, it was a language, and it could be read by those who lived it.

I agree, and this is where Lacan would be beneficial, since the dynamic viewed within that framework tracks systems-of-meaning, of which kinship and social relations are constitutive, not the other way around ... i.e. the 'common sense' way we look at language as being something objective we merely spill out of our mouths. Mircea Eliade comes to mind, too. Others, natch. Ain't no royal road, as they say.

But we're already on the edge of the tar pits here ...

Underneath our language, remnants of it undoubtedly remain, and in my opinion, motivate -- if only we knew how -- much of the emotional confusion which crops up whenever we attempt to discuss or regulate it.

Agree here, too ... though I would argue with you about how much of it is 'underneath' any language that is a thing separate from that-which-is-under, if we were to wade out into it. Having a more satisfying way of understanding the eruptions, either for practical reasons or just to understand, would be great.

The 'how', to me, isn't so much a mystery as a case of overdetermination; we've got a fistful of explanations, many of which fit the bill for any particular eruption (such as this one) for a specific group of people, but since we're talking about human beings, we can't say for sure what's operating on which group, when.

Maybe when they develop the 'phenomenological MRI' ... :>

I experienced the longest attempt to explain how gay marriage somehow harmed those against it about a dozen years ago, when my team and I were getting ready to go live on a project we'd been death-marching for almost fifteen months.

The CIO at this company was a flaming RW ass, with very involved but ultimately contradictory or non-sensical opinions about everything. No boundaries with this guy, so he went off on a week long tangent, throughout our sixteen-hour work days.

The gist was that gay marriage somehow eroded the value of the marriage contract for which the state was acting as third party insuror. Marriage was by definition an arrangement that was exclusive, required investment by its principals, provided a stream of returns, and that by reducing its exclusivity and diluting the pool of those returns provided by or guaranteed by the state (not all of which were material), the value of the overall contract was diminished. Though only a part of the package, this dilution also undermined the social value placed on the institution, deepening the harm. Also, extending (social) benefits produced what economists would call a collective action problem, a tragedy of the commons.

We had multiple go-rounds on why the alleged value outside material benefits was scarce enough for this to apply, what the mysterious essence of this value was. After multiple challenges to other means of 'dilution' by the actions of married heterosexual couples, domestic abuse, divorce, green card scams, polygamy (it came up), etc, what we ended up with was that the value of the contract came from its exclusive nature (he ducked the social reproduction-value question, IIRC), which had to be preserved for there to remain any value in it. Begging the question, in other words, in ten days or less.

@Monseiur Snoid:

yer killin' me man.

Thanks!Um, that's good, right?

Friday's a good day to stop and smell the absurd, right?

@Willie Tee

Thanks also. Very nice to hear it, though I can't imagine why you would waste a compliment on those other two a**holes.

(Kidding!)

I agree about the Algonquin effect, there's a little something extra added when you get the right crowd, the right atmosphere, a touch of humor and sociability, and a little laxity of the rules around the edges (within reason). I think bucky will see that what you describe is not so different from what he wants, once he smokes it over awhile ...

@Mona

Not to get into the middle of the serial dust-ups between you and the Moosinator, but in this case I don't think he was talking about you, but rather a certain other guy in his orbiting mind-control beam space station ...

Richard Reeves

Fri May 16, 6:26 PM ET

WASHINGTON -- "The Change You Deserve" may sound like scrambled Obama, but it was, in fact, considered as this election-year slogan of the National Republican Congressional Committee. It was rejected when someone noticed that it was also the slogan of a prescription drug called Effexor.

Effexor is an anti-depressant.

...

Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, who preceded Cole at the NRCC, sounded even more depressed in a 20-page memo he was circulating among party members: "These races were not in New Jersey or New England, where Republican erosion has taken place over the last decade. They were in the heart of the Bible Belt, the social conservative core of our coalition. ... Members and pundits, waiting for Democrats to fumble the ball so that soft Republicans and Independents will snap back to the GOP, fail to understand the deep-seated antipathy toward the president, the war, gas prices, the economy, foreclosures and, in some areas, the underlying cultural differences that continue to brand our party."

http://tinyurl.com/4rrlfa

... is you are not giving peace a chance.

HTTP 500 Internal Server Error, just now.

The Doggie-go-doo tutorial might actually be an improvement ... sorry you're having all the trouble!

May 16th, 2008 | PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- A Brown University student says she's been suspended for hitting a New York Times columnist with a pie during an Earth Day speech.

http://tinyurl.com/45hn2l

It was about 'his brand of environmentalism' and not his phallic, war-loving eyes, but sometimes a pie is just a pie ...